Please Help

Well, we’ve been busy.

Since the tornado hit, I’ve been to Arab to bring food to a friend, to Cullman with Leslie to bring cases of food we bought at Sam’s for the food banks there (the churches there are doing some great work!) and visit friends (one of whom still doesn’t have power), Leslie has been to Rosedale and Alberta City to help people as a RN, Av brought supplies to Pratt City:

Can you imagine?

…and yesterday, Av and Leslie and I along with a group from one of our congregations went to Pleasant Grove, bringing supplies and helping to clean a residential section.

The homesite we stopped at belonged to an older lady who had taken shelter from the tornado in her bathtub. It was estimated that she had been thrown 50-100 feet away (bathtub one way, her another, but she survived). Her home was a tangle. It was impossible to tell amongst all the lumber — just sticks, really, where the home started and ended.

We made stacks (that’s Leslie on the left and me on the right) of wood, concrete blocks, metal, trash, and personal items.

What a strange thing to say that I felt ‘lucky’ but the part of the site that I climbed into at first looked like an area that I was going to need to pull plastic sheeting and insulation out from — but when I looked closely, it was strewn with mud-smudged photographs and cards:

I worked in that area most of the morning and must’ve uncovered twenty to thirty wet, limp, dirty, torn, battered pieces like this. There was a wedding invitation, several holiday cards, pages of the Bible with sections underlined, and photographs of football players and small children.

Leslie found several whole Bibles. Av worked mostly with moving lumber and metal, but then we found a section strewn with Christmas decorations. I found a mud-splattered mesh fruit bag for oranges that had a name written across it in glitter puffy paint that had served as a Christmas stocking. We found strings of those large opaque bulb Christmas lights. And we gathered the Christmas tree. There’s no telling what, come December, these items might mean then.

Leaving, I made a little short movie:

Can you help? People can donate through the Red Cross, join groups going into the area (one site if you are in central Alabama is Hands On), Google articles about the recovery effort and try to contact one of those groups/churches, and so on. Anything you can do to help would be so greatly appreciated. Thank you!